The unionization wave in higher ed continues apace, with grad student workers at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles winning a union election in mid-February. Jacobin spoke to USC worker-organizers about their win and their contract demands.
Early Pentecostal preachers railed against elites and uplifted the oppressed — a far cry from their recent efforts to elect right-wing populists like Donald Trump. There are deep contradictions at the heart of Pentecostalism, and they aren’t resolved yet.
US refugee policy holds that only victims of political violence, not "private" acts like domestic abuse or gang violence, deserve refugee status. But we can't talk about such violence in Central America without talking about mass incarceration and US policy in the region.
Few workers hold as much potential power as dockworkers. Studying the history of those workers, both in the San Francisco Bay Area and Durban, South Africa, shows how such workers can continue building that power into the twenty-first century.
Across the United States, we’re in the middle of a brutal housing crisis. We need rent control to get us out of it.
The Mexican Revolution was a transnational explosion of resistance to grinding exploitation that kicked off a global epoch of anti-capitalist revolution.
Like something out of a heist movie, the biggest strike of last year ended with a carefully orchestrated direct action involving spycraft and disguises. The mission: to disrupt a meeting of University of California regents and force the administration’s hand.
On reactionary novelist James Ellroy and his Underworld USA trilogy’s surprising treatment of communism and anticommunism.
Journalist Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS uncovered undeniably bizarre facts— and high-profile lies — about the 1969 murders that we still can’t stop thinking about.
Throughout US history, reactionary forces have used immigration law to silence political speech — just as the Trump administration is trying to do against Mahmoud Khalil and several others.
When the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike against Mayor Rahm Emanuel ten years ago, corporate education reform was on the march. The CTU won that strike, beat back the neoliberal Democrats, and turned the tide in favor of public education.
As Trump's threats to immigrants grow, we should look back to the 1980s Central American sanctuary movement's victories.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the Democrats took a jackhammer to education, housing, and social welfare. This isn’t the story of a weak party unable to defend its earlier gains, but a transformed party demolishing them in service of a new neoliberal ideology.
When and where organized labor’s been on the move.
Oakland teachers aren’t just fighting for a living wage and better working conditions. They’re fighting against the closure of dozens of schools, which would pave the way for the privatization and destruction of public education.
Though educators did not achieve all their demands, Oakland’s teachers strike transformed the city, won important gains, and empowered educators to take on the billionaire education privatizers.
Most workers in the US are barred from claiming unemployment benefits if they go on strike, penalizing them for exercising one of their most fundamental rights. New legislation in California and elsewhere is trying to rectify that injustice.
Too often, the militant, radical history of Mexican American workers is omitted or forgotten. But from resisting racist exclusion to building CIO unions in the 1930s, Mexican American workers have been central to left-wing politics in the United States.
When and where organized labor’s been on the move.
Earlier this month, California passed a bill requiring the state to produce a study and recommendations on expanding the state’s social housing sector. Organizers hope it will be the first step in providing de-commodified shelter on a large scale.